The winner, Rachel looked anorexic. She had no more muscle mass and her face was loose from too much weight loss. I was so sad to see it because I rooted for her. She was an athlete and now she has an eating disorder. Bob and Jillian's faces sad it all. Go look at the clip.

I loved Rachel and was rooting on her. The whole crown was in shock when she walked out. She tripped stepping up to the scale and didn't realize that she had won until Alison specifically told her. I would be shocked, if the trainers don't try to do an intervention. Bob and Jillian's face was the same as most of the people watching. So heartbreaking.

I think I've seen every season of TBL and this was the most shocking weight loss. There's lots of comments online about it being too much. Bob and Jill did not look happy. Maybe she needs the money and knew it would be hard to beat the guys.

@Naughty. It's harder to tell in that still. If you saw the clip it is very obvious. My daughter and I were just shocked by how sick she looked. So were Bob and Jill and the panel behind them. She aged 20 years in the face. She is beautiful, but she over did it and I'm sorry for her. Maybe it was just for the money, who knows.

This TBL contestant looks amazing but it has to be one of the worst ways to lose weight.

Although the programme is done under the supervision of the trainers, the practice of spending your day exercising until you can do no more, followed by short sleeps and then going back to do more exercise, is not good for anyone.

When you take into consideration that a lot of the contestants are used to doing little, or no, exercise before embarking on the strict programme TBL enforces, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that there are going to be consequences – physically especially, but emotionally too.

The way that the contestants are spoken to – in an effort to scare them into working harder – is just so cruel; going from doing no exercise to having to run on a treadmill for a time decided by the trainer, who has no concept of how bad you are feeling, and laughing at you when you are vomiting from working so hard, telling you that they don't care and to 'get back on that bloody machine' – should not be allowed. But it is, because that's what makes good TV and ensures people will tune in and watch.

And then what happens if you're booted out in week six, already made to feel like a failure by the trainers and other contestants combined – let alone yourself – and you return home, unable to keep up that exercise-sleep-exercise-eat-sleep-exercise-sleep routine? Inevitably, you put the weight back on.

Or, if you've been quite successful on the show and have shifted a huge amount of weight in a record amount of time – did anybody tell you about gallstones, one of the most common side effects of weight loss? How painful the attacks are – like you're having a heart attack and are being stabbed over and over again in the back, all at the same time? No? What about the heart palpatations and cramps in your joints from all the exercise? No? Surely they told you about all the loose skin you'd be left with which could well require surgery to remove …?

I think TBL is an amazing concept BUT it needs to be done over a year (at the very least), not several weeks.

Rachel from Biggest Loser is now underweight with an unhealthy bmi. You can't tell from the picture but on the show she looked gaunt and sickly. The trainers and other contestants were looking at her in horror, not pride. She lost nearly 60% of her body weight. Rachel has traded one unhealthy lifestyle for another, you could see her obsession and competitive nature taking over. Even with five more pounds on her she still would have won. Hopefully BL gets back to being a show about changing people's lives for the better and does a better job supervising healthy weight loss and self-image.

@Renoblondee: Very true – you can tell a lot about someone from reading their face and you cannot hide strain and stress. Just by looking at these pictures you can see the woman has gone through 'something'. Cuddly people always have less wrinkles and look happier as well as slightly younger; too-thin can really age a person and make them look very strained.

@NaughtyNurse – supposedly, yes. But they seem more focused on weight gain than they do loss. I have to say – personally speaking – that Jenny Craig work in that way too. I lost over 55kg in the space of 11 months on Jenny Craig and was encouraged to keep going, even though I weighed 48kg and am 1.68cm tall. Of course, once I was on a roll I wanted to keep going … but the only way I could keep losing was to consume nothing but diet Red Bull on my non-Jenny Craig days (four a week). I just about ended up in hospital, I was so emaciated, and it took me a very long time to see food in a good way again.

Ooops – confusing things all over the place today! I meant to say that they seem more focused on weight gain, in that if you put it on they'll grill you, wanting to know what you've been doing, etc., than they do loss, for which they'll smile and congratulate you.

You're right, right, right. I have a friend who has lost nearly forty lbs in the last year from doing stupid shakes, following a stupid packaged plan her "doctor" sells, and taking appetite suppressants. I, on the other hand, lost about 25 lbs through running (marathon- check!) and eating right. I've asked her time and again, "when you reach your goal weight – then what?" What's your plan for AFTER this program. She has no answer. She tried to step-down from the suppressants and the weight came right back on. She refuses to get active & swears that is the ONLY way for her. We can't even talk about it anymore, because I think that she knows it isn't a permanent solution. Her "doc" isn't teaching her anything about eating right or healthy living. But I digress, what they do on TBL is FAR to extreme, and just like those suppressants, what happens when you have to return to your home, go back to a regular job and can't live in the gym? It's a brutal process and then they're dumped back out on their own. I don't watch, cause I can't stand Jillian Michaels, but I'd be curious to see where previous contestants (winners or not) end up.

Hm. Like I said, I've never watched it, but it seems like the show should make some changes. Not sure what they can really do to prevent this, though. As somebody with a personal history of eating disorders, I've NEVER found anything appealing about TBL. It always seemed like it would lead to problems like this.

The picture that Enty posted of the BL winner haunts me because she looks so much like Karen Carpenter in it. And there's a HUGE difference in her body at last night's live finale and the triathalon that she competed in on the show as the last episode prior to last night.

And try as I may, I can't find any site that will say when the taped episodes were filmed versus last night's live reveal. But I can't imagine it was more than a month or so, and Rachel literally looks like she lost another 20 pounds.

She was all bones and angles, and it was sad. She has the razor-sharp collar bones and super boney shoulders and joints and it was alarming.

She may very well have opted to go with no solid foods for a couple weeks to make sure she won.

And I get that it's $250,000, but this puts the show in a really bad position, because now the winning "inspiration" looks like she suffers from an eating disorder.

She lost 22 pounds a month for 7 months and is 12 pounds below the BMI index's lowest starting weight for the weight range of a woman her height. What TBL can do is include a disqualification clause in the contract to be on the show that if a contestant drops below, for example, the BMI index's healthy weight range they don't win.

It was 11 weeks after they left the ranch and they had to train during that time on their own. That is the reason Bob and Jillian was so shocked when they saw her as she did not look like that at all when she left the ranch, none of the final three did.On both Bob and Jillian's facebook pages a poster said that she attempted to join their gym like they are supposed to do but was turned down from their over her desire to lose so much weight which would cut into her muscle mass. Now if she found another gym I have no idea but I do know I was shocked by what I saw and so were the judges. Someone asked about prior contestants and many were sitting in the audience last night. There have been some who have gained weight back but on average quite a few have not and they maintain facebook pages and things of that nature.

@Jacq: That's very sad, Jacq – see my comment below, I did the same thing through Jenny Craig so know your friend's euphoria from losing the weight, and denial that there will be a problem adjusting to normality, and maintaining your weight, when you reach your goal.

One of TBL's winning contestants from last year (or year before last) in Oz, Margie Cummins, has experienced a range of health-related issues since going back to everyday life. I'm sure there are more, but hers was well-publicised over here. It seems to be very much a case of once you leave TBL house, that's the end of your contact with the trainers – you're on your own. You'd have to be a very strong and special kind of person to be able to maintain the pressure they imposed on you in the house, all on your own when you left.

11 weeks?! Gosh, that's quite a long time. She may well have not eaten anything at all during that time – you can quite easily eat very little and lose masses of weight without exercising. If she wasn't eating enough food she'd be low on energy anyway, so would likely find it hard to exercise for hours at a time like what she'd been used to at the house.

I have to say, if that was me in her place I would've done the same – done anything I could in order to win. Some people are just like that – she'd come so far, she wasn't about to lose out on first place through not continuing to work hard.

Yep, fat people are generally seen as lazy, lacking willpower and undisciplined.

I used to work for a man who considered eating lunch a sign of weakness. He used to insist that we kept working through lunch, saying that the hunger would make us work better (um, no – it made my tummy grumble and me very grumpy!).

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